Wednesday, October 21, 2009

This week's North Coast Journal has a great article about the problems facing the Humboldt County Municipal Water District now that two pulp mills have closed.
Heid Walters does a great job talking about some of the options available to us in this article available for free on news racks Wednesday morning. Correction: The paper comes out on Thursday morning, I got an early copy tonight.

One of the ides put forth is by Terry Spragg is to put that water in large bags. Tow several together like a water train and sell the water to somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. Due to the closing of the last pulp mill, the county has up to 60-thousand extra gallons of excess water a day. The pulp mills paid for roughly half the cost to run the water district. Finding a way to capitalize on the excess water and retain the rights to the excess water are key in the reasoning behind the plan.

Another idea floated by fisheries consultant, Bill Kier, is to use the extra water to provide more salmon habitat. Read the article and learn more about this.

Some have said that in the future, wars will be fought for water instead of oil. If that is true, we have a commodity here on the north coast worth shipping. If water was worth as much as oil, it might be something to ship via railroad to dry, dusty, inland areas of California.

Photo of work on Mad River Ca. during Caltrans bridge replacement earlier this summer.
The bag is filled with water to divert the fish in the river away from pile driver sounds.
They literally put a fenced in corridor down the center of the river for about a month.